Video is a big deal. Just a few recent statistics from YouTube.com will help to back me up:

• Over 800 million unique users visit YouTube each month
• Over 3 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube
• 78 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• In 2011, YouTube had more than 1 trillion views or around 140 views for every person on earth!
• 500 YEARS of YouTube are watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 YouTube videos are shared on Twitter each minute

And these are just stats for YouTube! There are many other online video mediums including Vimeo, blip.tv, Viddler, and Dailymotion, to name a few. The point is…online video is crazy popular! People love watching video and are six times more likely to watch a video on a subject than to read about it! This is the reason that TV is the medium where the most advertising dollars are spent. Folks love “moving pictures”, whether it is at the movie theater, from their TV, or now more than ever, coming from their computers.

Social media welcomes your videos with open arms, whether you are demonstrating a product, giving tips in your field of expertise, or showing off a recent project, video allows you to connect with people in a more intimate, trusting, educational, and fun way. And uploading or linking your videos to your social media assets will allow them to be shared and go viral much faster.

It doesn’t matter how small your company or organization is, your audience can be the entire online population. If you can get creative, and get the attention of a few…you can let the viral sharing do the rest!

Finally, I would be eating my own words if I didn’t share a video with this blog post, so enjoy this clip of Kevin Allocca, Trends Manager for YouTube in which he explores why videos go viral: